Abstract
Based on a written Chinese–English code-switching corpus compiled from a Singaporean bilingual novel, this paper reports on the distribution of instances of inter-clausal code-switching in terms of their length, the distribution of the position of instances of inter-clausal code-switching in mixed sentences, and the pragmatic functions of inter-clausal code-switching of different lengths in different sentence positions. The study yields four results. First, the distribution in terms of length fits Zipf’s Law well, and bilingual speakers attempt to avoid lengthy inter-clausal code-switching in their communication. Second, the majority of inter-clausal code-switching appears in sentence boundary positions. Third, the major pragmatic functions of shorter or longer instances of inter-clausal code-switching are turn-opening, turn-closing, explicitness, and accuracy. Finally, instances of inter-clausal code-switching with medium clause lengths have two main functions, which are the conveying of irony and emphasis.
Funding source: The Major Program of National Social Science Foundation of China
Award Identifier / Grant number: 18ZDA290
Acknowledgments
We thank Heng Chen for insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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Research funding: This work is supported by the Major Program of the National Social Science Foundation of China (No. 18ZDA290).
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- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial 2022
- Research Articles
- Perceptual similarity is not all: online perception of English coda stops by Korean listeners
- How Russian speakers express evolution in Pokémon names: an experimental study with nonce words
- Individual differences in simultaneous perceptual compensation for coarticulatory and lexical cues
- Phonetic change over the career: a case study
- Quantifying the importance of morphomic structure, semantic values, and frequency of use in Romance stem alternations
- The syntax of the diminutive morpheme -aaj in Egyptian Arabic, Syrian Arabic, and Jordanian Arabic
- Length, position, and functions of inter-clausal Chinese–English code-switching in a bilingual novel
- Discourse connectives and their arguments: an experiment on anaphoricity in German
- Modeling (im)precision in context
- The landscape of non-canonical ‘only’ in German
- Introducing Construction Semantics (CxS): a frame-semantic extension of Construction Grammar and constructicography
- Defining numeral classifiers and identifying classifier languages of the world
- A multivariate analysis of causative do and causative make in Middle English
- Unstressed versus stressed German additive auch – what determines a speaker’s choice?
- Metaphors are embodied otherwise they would not be metaphors
- A word-based account of comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda nouns in the Discriminative Lexicon
- Accounting for the relationship between lexical prevalence and acquisition with Bayesian networks and population dynamics
- L2 motivation and willingness to communicate: a moderated mediation model of psychological shyness
- Why are multiword units hard to acquire for late L2 learners? Insights from cognitive science on adult learning, processing, and retrieval
- Regularization in the face of variable input: Children’s acquisition of stem-final fricative plurals in American English
- The Manchester Voices Accent Van: taking sociolinguistic data collection on the road
- Interpreting the order of operations in a sociophonetic analysis
- Individual variation in performing reading-aloud speech among deaf speakers
- Generating hypotheses for alternations at low and intermediate levels of schematicity. The use of Memory-based Learning
- How can complex graphemes be identified in German?
- The Menzerath-Altmann law on the clause level in English texts
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